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Candy Crush maker’s IPO values company at more than $7 billion

King, the company behind the Candy Crush saga filed its IPO today, but is the maker another Zynga ( Farmville ), another Rovio ( Angry Birds ) or something else again? Nearly 100 million users play Candy Crush every day, and while the company’s titles remain free to play, it depends on virtual goods, additional levels and content purchases to bring in the cash. Selling shares at $22.50, it’s raised around $500 million for the company and its early investors, valuing King at around $7 billion. The company apparently isn’t going public because it needed the money, however, but because it will give the company stock it can use to make acquisitions… and let investors cash out if they want to. Shareholders will be pushing the gamesmaker to repeat the success of Candy Crush , something that more recent titles, like Farm Heroes saga, haven’t (so far, at least) been able to accomplish. Filed under: Cellphones , Gaming , Tablets Comments Source: NY Times , WSJ , SEC

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Candy Crush maker’s IPO values company at more than $7 billion

Watch a large ship getting deformed from the inside in a heavy storm

On the left, a ship in a heavy storm as seen from the deck, going through giant waves. On the right, a ship in a heavy storm seen from a level deep inside, going through the same stress forces. I really don’t know which perspective is scarier. Read more…        

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Watch a large ship getting deformed from the inside in a heavy storm

Google: Cloud prices should track Moore’s Law, are falling too slowly

Tharan Parameshwaran Google today continued the trend of cloud services price cuts, while claiming that cloud network operators aren’t cutting average prices quickly enough. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google frequently advertise  price cuts , but Google today claimed that “pricing hasn’t followed  Moore’s Law : over the past five years, hardware costs improved by 20-30 percent annually, but public cloud prices fell at just 8 percent per year.” In today’s announcement, unveiled at Google’s Cloud Platform Live event , the company said, “We think cloud pricing should track Moore’s Law, so we’re simplifying and reducing prices for our various on-demand, pay-as-you-go services by 30-85 percent.” Moore’s Law is the observation that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles about every two years, bringing steady increases in processing power. One Amazon price cut last year was on the order of 37 to 80 percent for its dedicated instances, so this actually isn’t that unusual. Google declined to say which companies it included in its “public cloud prices” statistic. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google: Cloud prices should track Moore’s Law, are falling too slowly

Microsoft releases source code for MS-DOS and Word

In recognition of their historical importance and commercial irrelevance, Microsoft has given the source code to MS-DOS 1.1 and 2.0 and Word for Windows 1.1a to the Computer History Museum  (CHM) in Mountain View, California. The source is now freely downloadable by anyone, though making practical use of it is an exercise for the reader. This source code joins other important early programs, including Adobe Photoshop 1.0 and Apple II DOS, among the CHM’s collection. Len Shustek, CHM chairman said, “We think preserving historic source code like [MS-DOS and Word] is key to understanding how software has evolved from primitive roots to become a crucial part of our civilization.” The scale of change between then and now is formidable. MS-DOS had just 300kB of source code and occupied as little as 12kB of memory. In 1981, MS-DOS was a key part of IBM’s PC, and the success of the PC—and its clones—made Microsoft the industry giant it is today. Word for Windows is the product that turned WordPerfect from market leader into all-but-irrelevant also-ran. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft releases source code for MS-DOS and Word

Official haircuts of North Korea

There are 28 official state-approved haircuts in North Korea, and there is renewed emphasis on the official coiffure parameters under its new leader, Kim Jong Un. Ironically, Kim’s own haircut is not on the official list.        

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Official haircuts of North Korea

Facebook purchases VR headset maker Oculus for $2 billion [updated]

Aurich Lawson Giant social networking company Facebook has just announced it has “reached a definitive agreement” to acquire virtual reality headset maker Oculus for $400 million in cash and 23.1 million shares valued at $1.6 billion. Oculus can earn another $300 million if it reaches unspecified performance milestones, and the deal is expected to close in the second quarter of 2014. In announcing the deal, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg indicated that the move is about much more than gaming, and goes well beyond the kneejerk FarmVille VR jokes that propagated at warp speed immediately in the announcement’s wake. “While the applications for virtual reality technology beyond gaming are in their nascent stages, several industries are already experimenting with the technology,” Facebook said in a blog post . “Facebook plans to extend Oculus’ existing advantage in gaming to new verticals, including communications, media and entertainment, education, and other areas,” he wrote. “Mobile is the platform of today, and now we’re also getting ready for the platforms of tomorrow,” Zuckerberg said in a statement. “Oculus has the chance to create the most social platform ever and change the way we work, play, and communicate.” Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Facebook purchases VR headset maker Oculus for $2 billion [updated]

Apple’s latest App Store experiment makes finding apps easier

With more than a million apps available on the App Store, finding the right one is often more troublesome that is needs to be. In an effort to ease that burden, Apple has quietly begun testing a new related search suggestion feature that aids the discovery of new apps, displaying categories similar to your current search term. For example, when you perform a search for Twitter apps, the App Store displays related listings for “news apps, ” “traffic apps” and “photo editors, ” queries that loosely match what users might associate Twitter with (okay, maybe not traffic updates). In the past, app suggestions were limited to Genius recommendations and “Customers also bought”, but Apple’s latest experiment shows it may soon do more with the App Store data available to it. It’s not known whether the company is manually curating groups of apps or relying on tags and keywords provided by developers, but it’s a small peek at the future we first imagined when Apple bought app discovery service Chomp . [Image credit: Macstories ] Filed under: Cellphones , Internet , Software , Mobile , Apple Comments Source: Macstories

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Apple’s latest App Store experiment makes finding apps easier

Microsoft Word Zero-Day Used In Targeted Attacks

wiredmikey (1824622) writes “Microsoft warned on Monday of a remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2014-1761) in Microsoft Word 2010 that is being actively exploited in targeted attacks. If successfully exploited, an attacker could gain the same user rights as the current user, Microsoft said, noting that users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than accounts with administrative privileges. ‘The vulnerability could allow remote code execution if a user opens a specially crafted RTF file using an affected version of Microsoft Word, or previews or opens a specially crafted RTF email message in Microsoft Outlook while using Microsoft Word as the email viewer, ‘ Microsoft explained Microsoft did not share any details on the attacks that leveraged the vulnerability, but did credit Drew Hintz, Shane Huntley, and Matty Pellegrino of the Google Security Team for reporting it to Microsoft.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Microsoft Word Zero-Day Used In Targeted Attacks